Editing wiki pages

In order to contribute to the Class Notes page as you are expected to, you need to know how to edit a wiki page.

If you want to experiment, feel free to play in the Sandpit page. (If this page doesn't exist yet, feel free to create it.) Nothing in the Sandpit page counts for anything, so you can add, change or delete whatever you like there.

The basics

From the wikispaces help:

Inserting mathematics

Including nicely formatted mathematics on web pages is tricky. The web wasn't really designed for that. Having said that, Wikispaces does a fair job using a markup language called LaTeX (pronounced "Lah-teck"). Here's how:

• Begin a block of mathematics with [ [maths] ] on a line by itself.
• Write your mathematics using LaTeX
• End the block with another [ [maths] ] on a line by itself.

LaTeX is pretty technical and some of you will find it difficult and frustrating. It may be useful for you to play with the equation editor at http://thornahawk.unitedti.org/equationeditor/equationeditor.php and when you get it how you want, copy and paste the LaTeX code into your document.

Actually, if you're serious about mathematics, LaTeX is worth learning. It is the usual way for typesetting mathematics for publications and in a lot of online mathematics discussions LaTeX markup is the standard way of writing mathematical expressions.

Some basics

• ^ means superscript and is usually used to mean "to the power of". For example x^2 means x squared.
• Use curly brackets to group things. x^{2a} means x to the power of 2a but x^2a means x squared a.
• \\ means start a new line
• \times and \div give the times and divide symbols
• Make fractions like this: \frac{numerator}{denominator}
• Spaces are ignored. (LaTeX handles spacing automatically.)

Here are some examples:

Linear and quadratic equations

y=mx+c\\
y=ax^2+bx+c
$y=mx+c\\ y=ax^2+bx+c$

The quadratic formula

$x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$
$$x=\frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2-4ac}}{2a}$$

Definition of a derivative

$f'(x)=\lim_{\Delta x\rightarrow0}\frac{f(x+\Delta x)-f(x)}{\Delta x}$
$$f'(x)=\lim_{\Delta x\rightarrow0}\frac{f(x+\Delta x)-f(x)}{\Delta x}$$

Definition of an integral

$\int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx=\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\sum_{i=1}^{n}f(x_i){\Delta x}$
$$\int_{a}^{b}f(x)dx=\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\sum_{i=1}^{n}f(x_i){\Delta x}$$
where
$\Delta x=\frac{b-a}n$
$$\Delta x=\frac{b-a}n$$
and
$x_i=b+i\Delta x$
$$x_i=b+i\Delta x$$